Webmaster General Forum

This year, daylight saving is starting early--a change that could cause Y2K-like headaches for IT professionals, and even for consumers.

Congress decided in 2005 to extend the period of daylight-saving time by three weeks in spring and one in the fall, reasoning that providing more daylight in the early evening would reduce energy use. However, the shift could cause trouble with software set to automatically advance its clock by an hour on the old date, the first Sunday in April, and not on the new date, the second Sunday in March.

IMO daylight saving time is the most idiotic moronic senseless idea known to mankind; I'm glad we don't participate. I wish I could go back in time and smack Benjamin Franklin upside the head.

Either you're using the energy in the evening or you're using it in the morning, so how does it "save" energy?

Quadrille, if you go to sleep at 10:00 pm and wake up at 6:00 am in February, then you go to sleep at 10:00 pm and wake up at 6:00 am in March, where do you get an extra hour of sleep? Are you talking about the one day - do you set an alarm clock and get up at a specific time on Sundays? Then you lose that hour in the spring? And it's not just "a few computer clocks", it's internet and intranet servers, thousands of VCRs, alarm systems, and other time-keeping gadgets. Doom? No. Pain in the petula? Yes. For what? Nothing.

Y2K wasn't doom either, but according to that article its price tag was 21 billion.

Um, kerboros? Or any other cryptographic channel which relies on the ticket being within a time spec?

Here's a goodie: *any* program written in C which relies on the time routines in the standard libraries. Ok, open sourcers, who's going to patch this one? Are you going to patch it in the code or wait for an update to the library?

I agree with those who don't like the changes. I would go further to say that if they want people running around in the dark, then they should mandate that businesses, schools, etc. should just adjust their hours accordingly at certain times of the year and leave the clocks alone.

Used to go to work from 9 to 5, okay, now it's 8 to 4.

Except government employees, now it's 9 to 4. This crock is all your fault anyways, and the less time you spend at *work*, the less damage you can do.

Oh yeah, and my standard answer to those local centric users who whine about having "their" timezone in their server reports, "the internet is timezone agnostic, there is no one timezone that suits all users, therefore we run our servers on GMT, make the adjustment mentally"

Speaking as someone who was there working on that fix, most of our time was spent scanning lines of code that someone else wrote.. a long time ago. Panic? Sure, I guess, since no one knew the extent of the 'hard-coded' issue. Everything had to be checked and tested. And there was a deadline that couldn't be extended. I don't recall a state of panic in our office, even as the final hours approached. It was more a state of resignation - 'here's another task that some unknown created for us'.

Back on topic. I had no idea of this change. If I ever saw it, it didn't register at the time. My computer, and my sites *should* be OK, I don't run time sensitive applications. I'm not so sure how this might play out with things like cookies and session ID's, not only from my site, but also from my third-party apps like my shopping cart.

The sooner we lose DST the better. In the UK it was brought in to help a minority of school children in Scotland! So the rest of the country suffers just for them. But what about all the students going home in the dark because of this? Do they feel safer?

As for saving energy, that doesn't mean you but power stations. Less energy needed to light and heat homes.

In WWII, I think, they even extended DST to 2 hours, to help soldiers use the most of daylight. But in today's wired society, it's nothing but a waste of time.

My digital camera stopped taking pictures at the right time when the clocks were last changed. If I hadn't noticed, all my subsequent pictures would have been out by an hour. Cameras don't connect to the net for automatic date changes. D'oh!

I also noticed problems on Flickr, where some dates were incorrect. Probably a bug in their code, but we wouldn't have to worry about such things if they left the clocks alone!

For the record, I really *@#$! hate DST... If you need to apply a "patch" to the "system" for 75% of the time, then the system itself doesn't work - or maybe it's just North America that doesn't. When I was officially registering my displeasure with the (then proposed) changes to the proper authorities, I heard one Canucklehead government official state that the change was necessary "to keep inline with the rest of the world." That's one way to stroke an ego, I suppose.

So I've heard the change is in "North America" only - what constitutes "North America" in this case? Specifically, I've yet to determine if Mexico is adopting the extra weeks (they do observe DST).

> In this case, were they really damn fool enough to hard-wire daylight saving?

Speaking of hard-wired DST...

In Perl, the command

localtime(time) will return the current date & time, and a flag indicating whether DST is in effect. What time will "North American" LAMP web servers report on March 12? Have Redhat, FreeBSD, etc., rolled out a DST patch? (Do they need to?) It's not a Perl issue, is it? (I note the documentation states, "[...] list elements are numeric, and come straight out of the C `struct tm'.")

Over the weekend the IT department patched all the XP machines, roughly 300. Today, throughout the course of the day, those machines jumped either an hour forward or back...

The impact? Company operations - across three countries - was brought to a complete standstill. "Millions" of dollars lost. Client projects, which can't proceed without the girlfriend's employer being fully functional, shut down...

Over the weekend the IT department patched all the XP machines, roughly 300. Today, throughout the course of the day, those machines jumped either an hour forward or back...

The impact? Company operations - across three countries - was brought to a complete standstill. "Millions" of dollars lost. Client projects, which can't proceed without the girlfriend's employer being fully functional, shut down...

according to the spousal unit, there are two patches delivered for xp since there is a problem with the first patch. if you installed KB928388 you need to install KB931836 [support.microsoft.com] as well. KB931836 is cumulative, so if you installed KB931836 you don't need KB928388.

Hah... Upon further review it turns out the girlfriend had accidently advanced the date while vacation planning (looks like I'm heading out in May!). After resetting the time to 1:59 AM though, it still failed to properly advance...

Everything worked fine for me, except my alarm clock, an old version of this one [brookstone.com]. I always thought it was a radio-controlled clock, but it's not. I want to shoot the person who designed it. Why the heck would you make a fake self-setting clock when WWVB receivers are so available?

I'm thinking of replacing it with this one [hammacher.com]. The only thing strange about it is, why is the outdoor temperature sensor so darn big?